Linking as the common factor: FREYA at the 11th RDA Plenary

Author: Ricarda Braukmann (DANS-KNAW)

The new secretary general of the RDA, Hilary Hanahoe, chose to open the 11th plenary in Berlin with a poetic comparison. Like an orchestra, she said, the members are a collective group of passionates who play for their audiences everywhere in the world. After some jokes about the still not finished new airport Berlin-Tegel by the local and the national State Secretary and an engaging panel discussion during which Klaus Tochtermann (ZWB) stated that partners are working hard not to let the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) become the European Open Science Chaos, the 11th RDA Plenary was officially opened.

For FREYA the RDA Plenary in Berlin was the first event to present itself and get in contact with the community since the start of the project in December 2017. And making use of this opportunity, FREYA was well represented at the plenary. A “Birds of a feather” event on Tuesday and acollocated event on Friday, both co-organized with the two other large European projectsEOSC-hub andOpenAIREAdvance, formed the core of this presence. During both events the three projects were introduced to the public followed by a short discussion. It became clear that, even though the subjects of these project may be different, they nevertheless pursue the same goal: to link components of research e-infrastructures like researchers, organizations, projects, and data. In other words, they are set up to structure the scientific landscape and provide a “360 degrees view of research” as Natalia Manola from OpenAIRE put it.

The FREYA team at the RDA Plenary

For us as members of the FREYA team the contact and engagement with the RDA community was most important. As the project about is all about the actual links between different areas of research, that is the persistent identifiers (PIDs), we will work on connecting and integrating PID systems but also set up new services. This work in progress shall be presented to the community (the PID Forum) for feedback through the RDA and its various working and interest groups. TheIG PID already confirmed its interested and will to collaborate during the group’s meeting on Friday morning where the launch of new RDA groups related to PIDs was discussed too. The FREYA team is looking forward to exchanging ideas and creating new groups and links with RDA members. Hopefully, we will be able to present the first results of this collaboration during the 12th RDA Plenary in Gaborone, Botswana, this November.

Until then, you can follow our progress through the FREYA website and twitter.